Shenmue 3: Release Date, Game Trailers, and News

The Shenmue III announcement was one of the big surprises of E3 2015, leading to an initial clamor of support which saw its Kickstarter campaign well over $2m within hours of launch.

- Advertisement -

Shenmue III‘s $6.3m total eclipsed the previous record holder, Blood Stained: Ritual of the Night, which raised $5.5m. It’s undoubtedly good news for fans of the earlier Shenmue games, and a sign of how much demand there is for a sequel among the sandbox series’ cult following. But it’s also some distance from the (perhaps over-ambitious) target Suzuki once set. He recently said he needed to raise $10m to make Shenmue III“a much larger, completely open world” video game.

You may recall that the first Shenmue, first released in Japan in 1999, cost a reported $70m – a staggering sum for the time, and still a significant budget for a piece of entertainment even in 2015. Shenmue IIIwill, barring some hefty private investment added at a later date, have less than 10 percent of that budget to play with – though its designers at Ys Net will at least be able to save money by using an off-the-peg engine (Unreal Engine 4) and recycled assets from earlier entries in the series.

At any rate, the success of the Kickstarter campaign means that the once-dormant Shenmue franchise has a new lease on life. We’ll just have to wait and see how Suzuki can reintroduce the series to a new generation of consoles and potential fans.

Here’s everything else we know about the game:

Shenmue 3 Release Date

Shenmue III has been delayed to 2019. Publisher Deep Silver explained in a blog post that developer Ys Net is taking more time “to polish the quality of the game even further, to the high standards it deserves and release the product in the best possible time frame.”

The game is coming to PS4 and PC.

Shenmue 3 Trailer

The Shenmue III team has released a teaser trailer for this highly-anticipated project, and it is…oh boy, it’s rough. It’s probably important to keep in mind that the game is still in the very early stages of development and, as such, this trailer is perhaps best thought of as a glorified piece of concept art for the final project.

With that in mind, here’s the first full-length teaser for Shenmue III:

Video of Shenmue III – The 1st Teaser | PS4

Yu Suzuki’s team at Ys Net shared a brief yet atmospheric taste of what it could look like: